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When I was doing my annual selection of Christmas stories the other day, I couldn’t remember why I vaguely disliked Thomas Nelson Page, just that I did. And that’s how I ended up reading a Christmas story about a Confederate soldier and his family. And I guess I’m glad I did.

It’s called A Captured Santa Claus, and it takes place between a Christmas and a Christmas during the Civil War. Major Stafford’s children are disappointed with the homemade presents that are all their mother can afford, but their father, home on a flying visit, promises the younger children that they’ll get what they want next year. For five year old Charlie, that’s a uniform and a toy sword. For his younger sister, Evelyn, it’s a doll with eyes that open and close.

Will Major Stafford be able to buy the gifts? Will he get home to Holly Hill to deliver them? Well, of course he will. But there are complications. By Christmas, Holly Hill is behind the Union lines, and going home without his uniform on could get Major Stafford executed as a spy.

This is basically the story you expect, but there are just enough twists to stop it from being completely predictable. And while Christmas is front and center, the Christmas spirit that goes with it is allowed to function without fanfare.

I did spent most of the story resenting a bunch of children for being Confederates, but, you know, that happens.

Jenn recommended Chip of the Flying U, by B.M. Bower, about a year ago, and that’s probably how long it’s been sitting on my Kindle. I don’t know why I picked it up this weekend, except that the internet in my apartment wasn’t working and I wasn’t feeling enthusiastic about anything I was more familiar with, but I’m glad I did. It’s almost entirely delightful, one of those books that does enough right that you don’t care that much about the stuff it doesn’t. And if you have to be content with a kind of ham-fisted ending, well, everything before that is so much fun that the book has kind of earned the right to fall apart in the last chapter.

The Flying U is a Montana ranch owned by James G. Whitmore, and Chip is a sensitive, artistic cow-puncher. Don’t laugh; it’s awesome. He’s got a square chin and long eyelashes and a horse he loves a lot, and it’s kind of over the top, but in a cute way. Della Whitmore is cute, too. She’s the younger sister of James G., paying an extended visit after graduation from medical school, and she’s got grey eyes and dimples to go with Chip’s chin and eyelashes.

She makes a positive first impression when she shoots a coyote with Chip’s rifle on the way back from the train station, the day of her arrival. The rest of the book is about him being in denial about being in love with her, basically. There’s no reason he should deny it, except that Della writes frequently to a Dr. Cecil Granthum. So Chip mopes, and “the Little Doctor” flirts with him and displays a fair amount of unreasonable behavior. I worry this is meant to make her seem more feminine. But more importantly, she’s good at her job, and he’s good at his, and there’s humor and artistic triumphs and a tiny bit of adventure besides. It’s a funny book and a sweet one, and while I found Della inconsistent, and Chip almost unrecognizable in the final scene, it his enough of the right buttons at the right times that I smiled my way through the entire book.

Cathlin recommended The Dorrance Domain, and I was frustrated enough with Peter the Brazen (which I’m still reading, bit by excruciatingly awful bit) that I started it almost immediately. It’s by Carolyn Wells, and it’s about a family consisting of four kids and their grandmother, who sick of life in New York boarding houses, decide to try living in a defunct hotel.

It’s a good concept, and it’s Carolyn Wells, so the execution should be good, too. But instead the whole thing just feels kind of halfhearted. I hear “kids living in an empty hotel” and yeah, I think, “oh cool, everyone can choose whichever room they want” and “they can spread out all across the hotel dining room.” And Wells provides that. But I also think I’m going to get kids biting off more than they can chew at first, and making mistakes, and slowly becoming more competent, and there’s barely any of that. Saying “barely any” instead of “none” is really nice of me, actually.

The problem, I guess, is that there’s no conflict. The Dorrance kids are like, “let’s try this thing,” and it goes really well, and then they’re like, “oh, cool, let’s try this other thing,” and that goes really well, too. And the magic of Carolyn Wells is that she can usually make that work, but, for whatever reason, she can’t pull that off here. I’ve talked before about how good she is at making her characters enjoy themselves convincingly, but she only manages it once in a while in The Dorrance Domain. Moments like the one in which Dorothy and Leicester collapse into giggles after signing in their first hotel guests, not knowing that their guests are basically doing the same thing upstairs, were too few and far between.

This feels like hackwork, basically. And — because it’s Carolyn Wells, and she is great — it’s not bad (except for some offensive stereotypes that seemed pretty mild in comparison to the ones in Peter the Brazen) just uninspired.

Because why not?

This post is brought to you by my tendency not to think things through before I write about them.

So, the thing about Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey is that she was lousy at endings. Like, she’s so good at putting prickly characters in twisty emotional situations and still having everything be super charming, but then the end is always a cop-out, or rushed, or suddenly makes you hate all the characters you loved for most of the book. Anyway, I read a review of one of her books at Fleur in her World the other day, and Fleur had the same issue with the last 10% of the book, but her praise for the first 90% made me want to read something by Mrs. G. de H.V., because when she’s good, she’s very, very good.

Flaming June skirts the ending issue altogether, by…not having one, sort of. And I can’t decide how I feel about that. Mrs. G. de H.V. basically spends half the book turning tropes upside down, and the other half taking other tropes super seriously and I can’t tell whether she’s doing any of it on purpose. And the self indulgent part of me wants a sequel, and the critical part of me is pretty impressed with Mrs. G. de H.V. for leaving things unresolved, and then just about all of me wants a sequel that has almost nothing to do with the main characters, but follows the villainess as she carries out the plans the heroine lays out for her.

Anyway.

When I started Flaming June, I thought, “oh, this is Mrs. G. de H.V.’s L.T. Meade book,” because there’s a breezily unconventional American girl and a sweet, sheltered English one who become best friends. But Elma, the English girl, hasn’t got the depth that Meade’s more conventional characters have, and Cornelia, the American, has more of Mrs. G. de H.V.’s respect than Meade ever gave any of her characters. Cornelia has come to stay with her cranky spinster aunt in a quiet neighborhood, and of course everyone’s familiar with the narrative of the cheerful young person making over the stiff and uncompromising elderly relative, but Mrs. G. de H.V. passes that by — it’s a story, but it’s not this story. Likewise the story of the brash American and the proud English girl finding common ground — Mrs. G. de H.V. concentrates on Cornelia and Elma’s friendship only long enough to throw Elma into the arms of her longtime crush, Geoffrey Greville. And to introduce Cornelia to Captain Rupert Guest, who doesn’t like her at all, until he does.

Mrs. G. de H.V. structures her romances as problems, which I enjoy, except that she’s kind of too good at it. I think that’s where a certain amount of her lousy finishes come from — she creates problems that are actually insoluble, and has to do violence to her characters in order to resolve them. The Guest/Cornelia problem is that they’re nothing alike, have no common interests, and don’t always even like each other very much. Which, if you think about it, is a problem you see in romances all the time, only it’s waved away, and you’re assured that the characters are going to be very happy together. And if the author is good enough, you believe it.

So, yeah, I was kind of concerned. Because Mrs. G. de H.V. IS good enough, but she also has this tendency to write herself into a corner. And that’s what she does, and…that’s where she leaves it. My respect for Mrs. G. de H.V. has increased enormously.

I realize I’m neglecting the book itself to talk about my various Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey feels, but I do find her really fascinating. She’s so good at certain things, but I never trust her. She’s always doing icky things like shoving characters back into their strictly defined gender roles and/or destroying everything I liked about them with one action. So when I come to a book like Flaming June, and I can see Guest constructing a different version of Cornelia in his head, one that’s based mostly on her least characteristic actions, I’m apprehensive. And then Mrs. G. de H.V. explicitly recognizes that. It’s tremendously satisfying and not satisfying at all. But mostly I feel pretty good about it. Well done, Mrs. G. de H.V.

So. More Amy Le Feuvre. This one is called Olive Tracy, and follows the title character over roughly the span of the Boer War. At the beginning, she’s the de facto housekeeper of her family’s home, which she shares with her mother, her younger sister Elsie, and Osmond, the invalid son of her dead eldest brother. The oldest sister, Vinny, is unhappily married and living in London, while another brother, Eddie, is in the Army, and not behaving as his family would wish him to. Then there’s their neighbors, Sir Marmaduke and Lady Crofton, and their two sons: Marmaduke is a captain in the army, and in love with Olive. He’s also steady and reliable and not super attractive in a way that made me think of Lord Algy from Pretty Kitty Herrick. Mark, the younger brother, is even more dissolute than Eddie, and seems to have been given up, even by his parents, as a bad lot.

Olive’s troubles begin when Marmaduke — Duke for short, thankfully — goes off to South Africa to keep an eye on Mark. He proposes before he leaves, but she turns him down, and only afterwards realizes that she might have feelings for him after all. Then her mother dies, and the Tracy household is split up, with Elsie going one way and Olive and Osmond another. Also the Boer War begins, and is omnipresent and awful in the background. Somewhere in there, Olive finds God in the same way that everyone finds God in these books, which is, I don’t know, either the most weirdly flat conversion I’ve ever read, or pure mysticism. Or both.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, “this” being both Amy Le Feuvre’s brand of religious fiction and my reaction to it. Part of it, of course, is that I find religion in fiction and in history a lot more interesting that I find religion espoused by modern-day people who would like me to act according to their moral code instead of my own. But part of it is definitely that matter-of-fact mysticism.

Another part, maybe, is related to how I feel about Precious Bane. Precious Bane has always felt more like Sci Fi or Fantasy to me than it does like a historical novel. It’s hard to identify the setting as Shropshire in the early 19th century, and easy to believe it takes place on an alien planet, with an alien culture and (especially) alien plants. Amy Le Feuvre unintentionally creates an alternate universe in a similar way.

I like the way Le Feuvre’s characters have different personalities that predispose them to different kinds of problems. If the solutions to all of these people’s problems are the same, well, Le Feuvre is convincing enough that it feels perfectly comfortable to believe that she’s writing of a world where things really do work that way. It’s not the real world, but that’s okay. It helps that the characters who find God retain both their personalities and their problems. It’s sort of like what I’ve been told about therapy: you can’t really just fix your problems, but you can acquire tools for dealing with them. And in the strange alternate universe chronicled by Amy Le Feuvre, there is only one tool, and it’s God.

I’m just kind of impressed, I guess, by the faint touch of realism evident in the messes most of Le Feuvre’s characters have made of their lives. Not that this, or her other books I’ve read, are in any way realistic. But there’s something about them — about the way people get better and worse and don’t know how to talk to each other or manage their lives — that kind of is. And there’s something seductive about the idea of handing all your worries over to someone else, someone absolutely trustworthy. And Le Feuvre conveys that appeal instead of doing as other authors of religious fiction do and making everyone prigs.

So that’s it. That’s the appeal, for me at least. I have made my peace with liking these books, and I’m looking forward to reading Her Kingdom again this fall, curled up in a big, comfortable chair with a hot toddy, or some other drink of which Le Feuvre would disapprove.

The Affair at the Inn is unusual in two ways: first, it’s a collaborative novel that isn’t a trainwreck. The four main characters are written by four different writers, and I didn’t finish the book with a sense that the writers hated each other, or that the plot at the end was hastily patched together from the ruins of what it was originally meant to be. Second, it’s sort of Williamsonian (alternating points of view, traveling American heiress, Scottish baronet with an automobile) but without anyone traveling incognito. Nothing else about it was unusual, but almost everything about it was very nice.

The four characters and their authors are as follows: Virginia Pomeroy, written by Kate Douglas Wiggin, is the American heiress, traveling around the UK with her invalid mother. Virginia is kind of a flirt, and does her best to attract the only man in the vicinity, Sir Archibald Maxwell Mackenzie. He’s written by Allan McAulay, and is a bit of a woman hater, although Virgina quickly starts to thaw him out. The other two point of view characters are Mrs. MacGill, a hypochondriac widow, and her companion Cecilia Evesham, written, respectively, by sisters Mary and Jane Findlater. I actually found the book while looking for something else by Jane Findlater.

Basically, the book is what you would expect. Mrs. MacGill tries, ineffectually, to obstruct the romance between Virginia and Sir Archibald. Cecilia tries to forward it, but she’s not really needed — Virginia and Sir Archibald do fine on their own.

I liked The Affair at the Inn, but I wanted it to be a little more substantial. Nothing that didn’t bear directly on the central romance was fleshed out at all — everything else was loose ends. Still, I didn’t feel the lack of anything while I was reading it, and if The Affair at the Inn has no ambitions to be anything but fluff — and if it does a pretty good job at that — then I shouldn’t ask for it to be anything more either.

So, apparently not every seraphic but practical child protagonist Edgar Jepson creates is going to be wonderful. The title character of The Admirable Tinker, like Pollyooly, is repeatedly described as an angel child and has a knack for attracting improbably large sums of money, but the book lacks whatever it was that made Pollyooly so magical.

That said, I enjoyed The Admirable Tinker. Just not as much as I thought I was going to.

Tinker is first introduced via his father, SIr Tancred Beauleigh, who has a face like Lucifer’s (to contrast with Tinker’s seraphic one) — and who is in search of a son he’s only just found out he has. Sir Tancred’s vulgar stepmother concealed the kid’s existence, and when Sir Tancred finally finds him, he’s in the care of a pair of abusive alcoholics, and is so grimy that it takes weeks of washing for his skin to stop being gray. It takes much longer than that for Tinker not to be terrified of everyone he meets, but we flash forward through most of that, as Tinker and Sir Tancred spend the better part of the next decade bumming around the UK and Europe.

That’s the big place where this went wrong for me. Tinker is about 12 for most of the book, and he’s a pretty weird kid, but he’s weird because he’s spent his childhood traveling and his father taught him to fence and be highly observant and not to do math. And that’s all very well, but if his peripatetic upbringing explains his detached attitude and extensive knowledge and complete self-possession, what’s the point of the troubled early childhood?

The rest of the book is enjoyable enough. Tinker plays tricks on people, and most of the time they serve some kind of practical purpose, but I think my favorite thing about him is how perfectly at home he is in all situations. My favorite bit involves him outfitting an American millionaire with a new wardrobe. That’s fun, and so are a lot of other bits, but I felt like Jepson was condescending to Tinker at times. And it’s not that he didn’t do that with Pollyooly so much as that I didn’t think about whether he’d done that with Pollyooly until it bothered me in The Admirable Tinker.

So, fun, but maybe not fun enough.

Check out the previous post in the series for stuff about short story series you’ve almost certainly heard of, and for my philosophy of short stories, which pretty much boils down to “they’re better when they come by the bookful and are all about the same character.”

These are the stories that I’ve written about here before. They’re in order from least to most awesome, which is not to say that the Our Square stories aren’t pretty good, or that Torchy isn’t a little higher on my list of favorite things ever than Emma McChesney. I mean, I put them in worst-to-best order by accident, and thought I might as well make a note of it.

Our Square

Samuel Hopkins Adams’ fiction is, mostly, ridiculously charming. He’s also occasionally pretty good at feelings (see The Clarion). He has a harder time mixing the two in short story form — what would be adorable or poignant in one of his novels sometimes ends up twee or depressing instead. He’s also hampered by what I guess must be a lack of creativity — I don’t know why else he’d choose to write variations on the same story over and over. Maybe it’s just another of the drawbacks to choosing to do your short story series about a location rather than a person or group of people. Still, overall Adams can’t help being ridiculously charming and occasionally good at feelings, and some of these stories are pretty great. Try “The Guardian of God’s Acre” in From a Bench in Our Square for the feelings and the eponymous “Our Square” in Our Square and the People in it for the first and possibly best iteration of the story Adams writes most often.

Pollyooly

The Pollyooly stories are super weird, funny, and surprisingly unsentimental about children. They also feature one of my favorite things in short story series, an improbably capable central character. And not just at grilling bacon. It’s not just that Pollyooly always lands on her feet — that category also includes characters who are constantly facing various kinds of doom, but manage to escape it somehow. Pollyooly never lets herself get that far — she’s too relentlessly competent for that. Conceptually Pollyooly is just like any other character with her own short story series: visually distinctive, really good at something, and exercising some kind of narrative gravitational pull. But the specifics make her different. She’s strange because she’s so mundane. This is the kind of setup where the beautiful orphan is supposed to be dreamy and imaginative, or bright and cheerful. Instead, Pollyooly is hardheaded, acquisitive, and totally lacking a sense of humor. It’s wonderful. The first stories here are the best, so start reading Pollyooly: a romance of long felt wants and the red haired girl who filled them</em>, and if you’re not enjoying yourself by the time Pollyooly finds employment as an artist’s model, you have my permission to stop. It’s also completely acceptable to skip the final book, Pollyooly Dances, which bears very little relation to the earlier stories.

Torchy

If you’ve read any of my previous posts on the Torchy stories, you’ll have noticed that I don’t know how to write about them at all. Part of it is that I love them unreasoningly. Part of it is that I have to consider the possibility that my intense reaction to them has nothing to do with their actually quality. I mean, maybe they’re not that good. I like them too much to be able to tell. That said, they’re textbook short story series, with a ridiculously resourceful main character, a well-defined and likable cast of characters, a great sense of place and time, and just enough adventure.

There’s basically no Torchy story I don’t recommend, although the last books in the series aren’t as unrelentingly awesome as the earlier ones. Start at the beginning, with Torchy. If at any point you are able to stop, I have nothing to say to you.

Emma McChesney

Emma McChesney is extremely unusual. She’s a woman — a single mother, even — in the 1910s who’s allowed to be ruthless, and smarter than the men around her. She’s also allowed to be sad sometimes, because Edna Ferber finds sad a lot easier than happy — as do many human beings, but few heroines of popular fiction from the 1910s. I know the secondary theme of this post is characters who are excellent at what they do, and no one is better at her ob than Emma McChesney.

Thinking about the Emma McChesney stories doesn’t overwhelm me with feelings the way thinking about Torchy does, but reading them is a perfect experience every time. They’re some of the few books I’ve talked about here that I feel comfortable describing as objectively excellent. It doesn’t even matter what you start with, but chronological continuity is nice, so I recommend Roast Beef, Medium.

So, yeah, The Adventure of Princess Sylvia and Princess Virginia (the latter credited to both Williamsons, the former to Alice) are the same book. According to this advertisement, Sylvia is the original and Virginia is the revision. But, contrary to the advertisement’s assertion, it hardly qualifies as a new story.

Almost everyone’s names are changed, as are some nationalities. The Ruritanian country of Rhaetia retains its name, but its emperor is now Leopold rather than Maximilian. And Princess Virginia adds some American blood to Sylvia’s mix of English and German. Things are a little more up to date — it’s a different English monarch that provides the heroine and her mother with a home, and there’s a sprinking of automobiles in Virginia that aren’t present in Sylvia. The dialog is a little snappier (as Jenn pointed out), and there are places where the plot has been smoothed over a little, making it seem less as if A.M. Williamson made it up as she went along. If you’re going to read one of these, Virginia is better, but again: same book.

Sylvia/Virginia is the daughter of a dead German Grand Duke, brought up in England by her English/half English mother. She hero-worships the young Emperor of Rhaetia, and plans never to marry, since she couldn’t bear to marry anyone but him. Except then it turns out that the Emperor — or at least his Chancellor — thinks she would be a very suitable wife for him.

You would think Sylvia/Virginia would be happy about that, but no — she doesn’t want an arranged marriage. She wants Max/Leo to fall in love with her. So she and her mother, plus a governess and a French maid, set out for Rhaetia incognito to give him a chance to do just that. And then, you know, hijinks ensue, including a final twist I saw coming a mile away but enjoyed more than the rest of the book anyway.

And, you know, it’s fine. I read it in one sitting, and then I basically read it again. But the more I think about it, the more annoyed I get, because the whole thing seems kind of ridiculous and unnecessary. I mean, talk about first world problems, right?

Look at it this way: you’re Sylvia/Virginia. You’re a princess. The guy you have a crush on wants to marry you, but instead of congratulating yourself on your good luck, you decide that not only is this the only man in the world you’re willing to marry, you’re only wiling to marry him once you know he would have fallen in love with you even if he hadn’t already decided you were going to get married. That’s…convoluted and crazy, right? And also not something a princess raised on the idea of an arranged marriage would come up with?

It’s just…she keeps putting him through these tests. She has to see how he behaves when he doesn’t know who she is, and how he behaves when he thinks she doesn’t know who he is. And then, even when she’s sure he’s in love with her, she won’t drop the masquerade until he’s actually said it. Only the dialogue that follows doesn’t quite match the dialogue she’d imagined, so everyone gets a chance to be stupid for a little longer. I understood why Sylvia/Virginia was insulted by the offer the Emperor makes, but she spent so much time creating openings for him to mess up that eventually there was going to be a test he wouldn’t pass.

There were so many times Sylvia/Virginia could have just gone home, assured of a happy ending, and she just wouldn’t. And Max/Leo wasn’t much better. Deciding that everything important in your life should take second place to someone you’ve known for a week isn’t romantic, it’s irresponsible. And I don’t enjoy watching people make bad decisions.

And then the Chancellor is made to be the villain, which is crazy. All he’s trying to do is arrange for the actual marriage that’s supposed to take place between Sylvia/Virginia and the Emperor. Why is it wrong for him to discourage the Emperor’s attachment to Sylvia/Virginia’s alter ego? Why is it wrong for him to tell the Emperor that the girl is clearly lying to him when, you know, she is? Why be so offended by the idea that Sylvia/Virginia and her mother came to Rhaetia to entrap the Emperor, seeing as that’s exactly what they did? And obviously the Emperor doesn’t have the reader’s knowledge, but you know who does? A.M. Williamson.

So, yeah. When the Chancellor tells the Emperor he must be out of his senses, I can’t help but agree.

Halfway through The Mystery, by Samuel Hopkins Adams and Stewart Edward White, I decided that I definitely was not going to review it. But now that I’m done, I kind of feel like I have to. It’s just so weird. At least, it seemed weird do me, but I’m not really in the habit of reading slightly sci-fi pirate-y horror stories, so.

The Mystery has a Frankenstein-esque framing narrative, which takes place aboard a Navy ship, the Wolverine. The ship is sort of wandering around the ocean, blowing up wrecks, when it comes across a schooner called the Laughing Lass. This is odd for two reasons: first, that the Laughing Lass had disappeared two years before with eminent scientist Dr. Schermerhorn, journalist Ralph Slade, and its captain and crew. The second reason is that the ship is entirely uninhabited, beyond the dead bodies of a few rats. That, and there’s food and still-warm ashes from a fire, so the Laughing Lass can’t have been unmanned for long. Then…well, more mysterious stuff happens. And eventually one of a large number of missing people shows up and tells his story, and it’s absorbing and awful.

I usually have trouble with books fueled by impending doom, but not here. Or rather, I was pretty freaked out the entire time I was reading, but not in my usual, irrationally upset about bad things that haven’t happened yet way. Actually, I think I might have been reacting to it the way people are supposed to react to scary books and movies but that I never do. I mean, I’m not going to start reading more scary stuff, because I’m still a wuss, but I’m closer to understanding the appeal than I was a week ago.

I should probably also mention the animal slaughter. There was a lot of it. It was very effectively horrible in the traditional sense of the word, and I can’t believe I managed to get all the way through it. I just — there are a lot of dead seals, okay? A lot.

In conclusion: way to go, Samuel Hopkins Adams. I trusted you, and now I don’t. And I guess it could just be Stewart Edward White at fault, but, not having a whole lot of information on the subject, I’m going to blame them equally.

I know I’ve said before that no one ever should have let Alice Williamson publish without Charlie, but I think I’ve changed my mind. I’m still not a fan of To M.L.G., and Shay says that The Adventure of Princess Sylvia isn’t so good either, but I just finished The Girl Who Had Nothing and I’m really glad it exists. (For what it’s worth, while this book is credited solely to Mrs. C.N.Williamson, it was published while he was alive.) This book, though. It’s like a cross between Miss Cayley’s Adventures and The Career of Katherine Bush, and it’s not as good as either of those, but that just means that it’s not as good as the beginning of Miss Cayley or everything but the end of Katherine Bush. It’s better than the less good parts of both of those.

The girl in question is Joan Carthew. Abandoned by her actress mother at a young age, Joan lives in a Brighton boarding house and works as a household drudge for the mean proprietress. Eventually she gets fed up and runs away, but instead of, I don’t know, looking for work or begging or something, Joan throws herself under the wheels of a wealthy woman’s carriage and uses her subsequent injury to insinuate her way into the woman’s house. Joan is, at this point, twelve. Yeah, she’s kind of a badass.

Lady Thorndyke takes Joan in, sends her to finishing school, and eventually adopts her, but then she dies, having neglected to update her will, and Joan is left penniless again. That’s okay though, because she still has the following:

•    Her finishing school education
•    A fashionable and expensive wardrobe
•    Brains
•    Beauty
•    Confidence
•    Knowledge of shorthand and typewriting

With these, she embarks on her career as a con-woman. Other people call her an adventuress, and she apparently thinks of herself as a highwayman (“rather a gallant one”), but basically she makes her living off conning people. It’s great.

She starts by taking the job that George Gallon grudgingly offers her after Lady Thorndyke dies. She makes herself extremely valuable there for long enough to pick up some knowledge of a secret business deal, which she manages to parlay into two months living on a yacht on the Riviera and a few hundred pounds for spending money. That interlude doesn’t go on for as long as she’d like, but Joan escapes unscathed and is soon in Cornwall, going by the name “Mercy Milton” and getting her landlady and the girl she used to babysit well established in life. That episode leaves Joan with little money, but the landlady’s house in Bloomsbury now belongs to her, and going forward it becomes her home base, the place where she stays in between adventures.

Basically, everything is awesome. Joan manages to be both ruthless and human in a way that really surprised me. In most books of this type — books about adventuresses, I guess — the heroine is only allowed to be capable and independent up to a point. It’s as if heroines of this kind are being allowed to take on a male role, having agency and adventures, but have to return to a passive female role in order to have a happy ending. Either that or they’re horribly punished. Joan does, inevitably, fall in love and settle down of the end of the book, but for the bulk of it, she’s allowed to play both the male and female roles simultaneously, lying and stealing and acting as a protector to other women but also caring about people and examining her feelings and things.

I found the ending to be incredibly abrupt. It was the thing I liked the least about the book. But I wonder if it was sort of on purpose — if A.M. Williamson didn’t want to add in the romance at all but thought she had to. I think she had to, too, but not in a bad way, and I wish she’d drawn out that portion of the story more. It’s interesting, though, that Joan’s love interest seems to be there mostly to affirm that Joan is a good person. She’s not particularly happy about the way she’s lived, but he tells her over and over again that everything she’s done has been okay. I want to wait at least one more Alice without Charlie book before I declare this a trend, but I hope this theme of good women doing bad things without being made to seem like bad women continues. It’s pretty cool.

Usually the first book of a trilogy is best, but in the case of Geoffrey Strong, Mrs. Tree and Mrs. Tree’s Will, I think the second one wins. Geoffrey Strong was awfully nice, but it was sort of narrow in focus. With Geoffrey and young Vesta out of the way, Laura E. Richards spreads out a bit. Mrs. Tree, sprightly and domineering aunt to Phoebe and Vesta Blyth, is the focal point, but the town of Elmerton — the once and future Quahaug — revolves around her, so you get to see a lot of it. There’s romance here, but it’s in the background. There’s a plot, sort of, but it’s not particularly important. Mrs. Tree is a bunch of bits strung together, and all the bits are really, really good.

I liked Mrs. Tree’s Will less. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Mrs. Tree dies, and, having lost the focal point of the previous book, Richards never really finds a new one. There’s a lot of reminiscing about Mrs. Tree, but that doesn’t help — it just made me miss her more. To be fair, I guess that adds some realism. Reading Mrs. Tree’s Will is a little bit like mourning for someone, so I won’t say it’s not good, but for the same reasons it’s not a particularly pleasant experience.

One thing I did like about Mrs. Tree’s Will was the way it expanded on the character of Homer Hollopeter, who was a figure of fun in Mrs. Tree, but gets to be a credible person in Mrs. Tree’s Will without losing any of his idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, there’s his brother Pindar, who would fit right in with the other inhabitants of Quahaug if Richards has written him with a lighter hand. The same can be said for the romances of Mrs. Tree’s Will, in one of which Pindar plays a part.

So, Geoffrey Strong was a lovely, self-contained thing. Mrs. Tree is entirely delightful. Mrs. Tree’s Will feels a little like Laura E. Richards felt obligated to write a third book about these characters, but didn’t really feel like it. I’m not sorry I read it…but I also kind of am.

I was going to wait until I’d read Mrs. Tree and Mrs. Tree’s Will to write about Geoffrey Strong, but I’m doing a mystery novel thing now, and I don”t know how long it’s going to take me to get around to them. Also I’m sort of sad about the implied death of Mrs. Tree.

Geoffrey Strong is short and sweet — very both — and reminded me a little bit of Joseph Crosby Lincoln (always a plus) and Myrtle Reed (in a good way, which isn’t a given). In a lot of ways, it’s the same story as Lavender and Old Lace, complete with a woman who puts a lantern in her window every night in memory of a lover who was lost at sea. Only better.

The woman in question here is Miss Vesta Blyth, an elderly spinster of the sweet and softly regretful variety who lives with her sister Phoebe, an elderly spinster of the acid-tongued, man-hating variety. Their house is the nicest house in town, and when Geoffrey Strong shows up in town to sub in for the local doctor, who’s got to go abroad or somewhere for his health, he decides he wants to live in it.

He insinuates himself into the Blyth girls’ good graces in the nicest way possible and moves in with them, and everything’s cool until their niece (also Vesta Blyth) shows up to recuperate from a nervous breakdown. She’s worn herself out at college, and Geoffrey is intensely disapproving, because apparently women are naturally unfitted for study. He’s super condescending, and it’s nice to see that being set up for a fall instead of tacitly approved by the author. Also there’s a bicycle crash, and delirium. It’s great. As for the rest of the book — well, the things you think are going to happen do happen, and the tone stays right all the way through. Laura E. Richards is pretty awesome, you know?

The Main Chance is one of those business-and-ethics-and-someone-has-a-pretty-daughter stories, brought to you by the author of House of a Thousand Candles. It centers on three young men and the fairly new midwestern town of Clarkson.

John Saxton is the newcomer. He’s from Boston, has never proved himself to be particularly good at anything, and failed at running a ranch in Wyoming before some friends found him a job overseeing the Western interests of an Eastern financial company.

Then there’s Warrick Raridan, born and bred in Clarkson. He’s cultured and charming and sort of the town’s only dilletante. He has a law degree, but has trouble sticking with a legal career, or with anything else. He and Saxton quickly become close friends.

James Wheaton is the one who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but while being steady and honest has landed him in his position as cashier of the Clarkson bank, it hasn’t done much else. he’s dull to talk to and doesn’t know how to deal with social situations at all.

Saxton is theoretically the protagonist, and the book begins and ends with him, but the middle spends more time on the other two. Which makes sense: while Saxton is slowly and carefully getting the affairs of the Neponset Trust in order and enjoying his friendship with Warry Raridan, the others are having Drama. Wheaton is learning how to be a person that interacts with other people and dealing with the occasional reappearance of his unfortunately not long-lost convict brother. Warry is trying to reform himself for the benefit of his old friend Evelyn Porter, who has only friendly feelings for him, although everyone in town insists on coupling their names romantically.

And then…I find that I don’t really want to give anything away. It took me a long time to get into The Main Chance, because it was kind of unfocused at the start, and not much was happening, but once I readjusted my expectations — away from House of a Thousand Candles and vaguely in the direction of V.V.’s Eyes — I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t the need to find out what happens, or to confirm my suspicion that a certain character was completely and utterly doomed, although those certainly helped. Mostly I just wanted to find out how everyone was going to resolve their personal inner turmoil. And also, later, to appreciate John Saxton being awesome.

Saxton doing that thing where a character finally lands in the appropriate position for their talents to be properly appreciated was a late highlight. So was a stocks-and-bonds-and-machinations mess involving public transportation that was gripping and involved until Nicholson decided to wrap it up much too quickly. What kept me reading until those things appeared on the horizon was the incredible grounding detail. Wheaton’s total lack of social skills was not only realistic but totally gutting, except in comparison to the passage where he goes to the fashionable church and Bishop Delafield’s sermon hits him so hard where he lives that he literally can’t listen to it, or understand why.

Next best, in kind of the opposite direction, was Saxton’s genuine, diffident kindness. When do protagonists of early 20th century novels get to be likable and self-effacing and hard to get out of their shells? Usually they’re darkly humorous and a little bit masterful or good-natured and outgoing and a little bit masterful. Saxton, is, I suppose, also a little bit masterful, but only professionally. And he’s embarrassed about it. I like him a lot, and Evelyn Porter, too, who is tarred with a similar brush. A contemporary reviewer found her to be too ordinary, and I agree, but I think it’s a good thing.

You may be getting the impression that this book is really wonderful. That impression would be, I’m pretty sure, mistaken. But parts of it are amazing.

I read The Old Peabody Pew last winter, but couldn’t figure out how to talk about it in time for Christmas. Also I was annoyed with it for being a Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin Christmas story about a woman in a small New England town and the man who left town and left her behind, and yet not being The Romance of a Christmas Card. So this year I read it again, trying to keep an open mind and not to skim for things actually happening. It helped to know that they never would.

And on one hand, I liked it better this time. On the other, it’s still not The Romance of a Christmas Card and, well, nothing ever happens.

That’s not strictly true, I know. The Tory Hill church gets a new chimney, fresh paint, and new carpeting in the aisles, among other things. But I’m not sure if Wiggin knew that this was a story about the local Dorcas society renovating the church. I think she thought it was a romance.

Nancy Wentworth is pretty cool, and Justin Peabody seems nice enough, but their story, which consists of a few flashbacks and one conversation that tells you nothing you didn’t already know, isn’t convincing enough to overcome its lack of page time. And while the ending, in which Nancy and Justin leave their small New England town for Detroit, is sort of optimistic in the context of Nancy and Justin, in the Dorcas society context it’s kind of sad.

It doesn’t stack up all that well as a Christmas story, either — the whole thing happens in the lead up to a Christmas which gives it a claim to the Unity of Christmastimes, but nothing very Christmassy happens — even Justin’s return home isn’t Christmas-motivated. The thing is, status as a Christmas story aside, The Old Peabody Pew is a pretty nice portrait of a group of women in a small town where men are scarce. But that stuff’s background, and the foreground is less interesting and less convincing.

Happy Captain Blood Day, everyone! You can observe this holiday by reading adventure novels, trading witty barbs with people trying to unjustly sentence you to death, or, okay, talking like a pirate. But only if the pirate is Peter Blood.

I felt bad posting a negative review of a Sabatini book on Captain Blood Day last year, so this year I made sure to choose a book I know I like. And actually Bardelys the Magnificent is super appropriate as a follow up to The Suitors of Yvonne. It’s not just that it’s full of French courtiers for whom dueling is always a viable problem-solving tool — Bardelys the Magnificent came out four years after The Suitors of Yvonne and it frequently reads like Sabatini’s (successful) attempt to reshape that book into something, you know, good.

The bottom line is that sometime between 1902 and 1906, Rafael Sabatini acquired a knack for writing likable main characters, and I have yet to come across a later instance where it failed him. So there’s Gaston de Luynes, who is massively hateful, and then in between there’s the guy from The Tavern Knight, who’s just kind of irritating, and then there’s Bardelys, who’s got really poor judgment and terrible timing, but who I like quite a lot.

Bardelys is a marquis or something, fabulously wealthy and a favorite of the king, who is one of the Louis — XIII, I think. He throws a lot of parties and he has a lot of friends. Chatellerault, a rival for the king’s favor, isn’t really one of them, but when he returns to Paris after an unsuccessful attempt to woo Roxalanne de Lavedan — at the behest of the King — he shows up at Bardelys’ house. No one really likes Chatellerault, so Bardelys is worried about fights breaking out, but eventually things start to calm down. Which is when Bardelys starts making fun of Chatellerault for not being able to succeed with Roxalanne. Poor judgment, bad timing.

Bardelys, Chatellerault and all their friends and acquaintances are both bored and extravagant, so the argument results in a wager: Bardelys has three months to court Roxalanne. If he wins, Chatellerault’s estates are his. If he loses, his estates are Chatellerault’s. Super poor judgment. But the wager has been made, so Bardelys heads off to Languedoc, more concerned about the fact that the King is upset with him — he’d prefer that Roxalanne marry Chatellerault — than with the fact that Languedoc is currently home to a rebellion by Henri II, Duke of Montmorency. Bad, bad timing.

Actually, pretty much as soon as they arrive in the area, Bardelys and his retinue stumble upon a dying rebel in a shed. His name is Lesperon, and before he keels over he asks that Bardelys take his papers and deliver them and his farewells to his sister and his fiancee. So it makes sense that Lesperon is on Bardelys’ mind when he stops at an inn later. It makes less sense that when he sees some soldiers and hears them say that they’re looking for someone, he assumes that the King has sent them after him rather than that they’re rounding up rebels. So when they ask him his name, he says “Lesperon.” Massive self-absorption, lousy judgment, incredibly precise bad timing.

His escape from the soldiers brings Bardelys, wounded, exhausted and without his retinue, to the Lavedan estate, where he falls in love at first sight with Roxalanne de Lavedan, climbs to her balcony, and faints. By the time Bardelys wakes up, her father the Vicomte has gone through his pockets and concluded that he’s Lesperon. And by the time Bardelys understands what’s going on, the Vicomte has revealed that he’s part of the rebellion, too, and Bardelys is scared of what would happen if he revealed that he was really a well-known friend of the king. This one, to be fair, is mostly really, really bad luck.

Roxalanne and Bardelys fall in love, obviously, but Bardelys is too busy agonizing over what to tell her about himself and darkly hinting at what a horrible person he is to tell her how he feels. Bad judgement. Then he sleeps in on the day when Lesperon’s fiancee and her brother come to visit, so they don’t see him and everyone becomes convinced that he’s behaved badly towards Roxalanne and the fiancee, which okay, isn’t totally wrong, but: bad timing. Then it’s out of the frying pan of Roxalanne’s disdain into the fire of being arrested — as Lesperon — for treason by the adorable Monsieur de Castelroux. Which actually goes a far way to sorting out Bardelys’ problems, because Castelroux is a reasonable guy and also they happen to run into the fiancee’s brother. Except that then there are more frying pans, more fires, and a very enjoyable forerunner to the courtroom scene in Captain Blood. Plus a duel, a couple of audiences with the King, and Bardelys’ super gross attempt to extort Roxalanne into marrying him (bad judgment) followed by massive amounts of regret (bad timing).

Obviously Bardelys is not without his flaws, but — and I doubt very much that this was intentional — he’s an extremely consistent character, especially in his flaws. I’m tempted to track down a copy of the 1926 movie and make a drinking game of it, only if I try to drink every time Bardelys displays bad judgment or bad timing, I don’t think I’ll make it to the end of the movie. Anyway, Bardelys the Magnificent doesn’t really need a drinking game — it’s fun on its own.

As I said earlier, a lot of this is familiar from The Suitors of Yvonne — the person in a position of power sending someone to woo a young woman out in the country, the hero falling in love with the young woman in question, honorable arresting officers, using the expression “out of the frying pan, into the fire” as the primary inspiration for the plot, etc. So what makes this whirlwind of consecutive impending disasters so much better than that one? Mostly Bardelys, and the fact that he’s capable of displaying a touch of humility, and also of not being magnetically attracted to duels. He’s got that essential Sabatini hero trait, the ability to keep cool under fire, and if he’s not as brilliant as the best Sabatini heroes, he makes up for it by being ridiculous in a kind of endearing way. Let me put it this way: there’s a reason Sabatini’s career didn’t really take off for another fifteen years, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t an excellent adventure novelist long before that.

I read Pam Decides, the sequel to Pam, on Sunday. A note at the beginning suggests that Pam was never intended to have a sequel, but I occasionally felt, as I read Pam Decides, that Pam existed for no other reason than to provide an excuse for one. Which isn’t true, but tells you a little bit about how I feel about both. I still like Pam, a lot, which is to say that I still find it frustrating and delightful and moving and difficult to describe. But my thoughts and feelings about Pam Decides are a little different.

When we last saw Pamela Yeoland, she had just been left penniless, homeless and friendless by the death of her grandfather. Her loving but neglectful parents were abroad somewhere. James Peele had proposed that Pam become his mistress after he married her cousin Henrietta, causing her to lose all respect for him. Eight years later, Pam’s 27th birthday finds her living in a boarding house in London with Jane Pilgrim, her old nurse, and making a scant living by writing romance novels.

Pam reconnects with Henrietta’s  mother, the Duchess, after receiving a letter from her, and the Duchess sort of comes to take the place of Lord Yeoland as a friend to Pam. There’s little overarching structure to the plot; von Hutten has a way of throwing stuff at Pam that’s all the more realistic for its lack of obvious purpose. So here’s some stuff that happens: Pam’s cousin De Rattrec “Ratty” Maxse chases her across London in a sequence that’s almost slapstick, her (other) former suitor Charnley Burke dies and leaves her an incredibly delightful house, she meets and forms a close friendship with a Polish diplomat named Jean de Lensky, she adopts a baby, and, inevitably, James Peele reappears in Pam’s life. Well, no wonder. He’s one of her best friends’ son-in-law.

So. Things I loved about this book:

Pam. She’s such a credible character, and such a credible adult.There are ways in which she’s incredibly strong and empowered and good a setting boundaries, and there are way in which she isn’t and doesn’t know what do do about things, and asks for help when she shouldn’t and doesn’t ask for help when she should.

The way characters drift in and out. The people who are important during one section of the two years the book covers aren’t necessarily the people who are important during other sections. Lensky is around for quite a while before he even speaks to Pam. The Penge family, some of Pam’s closest friends at the end of the book, don’t even appear until maybe three quarters of the way in.

Jack Lensky. I just. I can’t even.

The Duchess being all supportive and caring and saying the right things at the right times.

The Duchess’ grandson.

The house. It is the best house. It has three front door and rolls of valuable lace stuffed into vases and stuff. I want the house.

Things I didn’t love:

I don’t really see the point of the baby.

Cyril Wantage, who breaks into Pam’s house (formerly his house) to steal some of his stuff back. Pam ends up becoming responsible for him and his wife, and while I sort of like what they — and Pam’s actions regarding them — bring to the story, Cyril is just so useless and I find him pretty irritating.

Things that just are:

Everything connected to James Peele. There’s no way of explaining this without giving away what happens, but it was all so interesting — seeing how he’s changed over the course of eight years, and knowing that he’s unworthy, and fearing that Pam will fall into his arms anyway. And she does, and it’s super uncomfortable. And then…what happens is simultaneously expected and a shock.

I don’t know how well this book would have worked for me if I hadn’t read Pam first. There’s a summary of Pam in the front of the book, but it doesn’t tell you much you couldn’t figure out from the text, and there’s so much in Pam that can’t be fully explained by passing references. But this is one of the stronger sequels I’ve read exactly because it moves on from the book that precedes it. By the time you get to Pam Decides, you’ve already been through Pam. You’ve gained a very clear understanding of what her childhood was like, and you’ve mentally calculated the ratio of happy marriages to unhappy ones and you’ve gotten your hopes of for James Peele and been disappointed by him right along with Pam. And now that’s all over, and Bettina von Hutten doesn’t feel the need to keep rehashing the same issues.

Pam is an interesting and frequently enjoyable novel in it’s own right, but in relation to its sequel, it’s like a prerequisite course in college: having been through it, you get to jump straight into the good stuff with the next thing. And it might just be because Pam Decides feels at times as if it was written specifically for me, but I really do think it’s the good stuff. I kind of want to sit right back down and read it again.

I tried to write a description of the plot of Bettina von Hutton’s Pam, but I found that I couldn’t remember anyone’s name. That’s okay, though. Aside from Pam Yeoland and her totally delightful grandfather, the characters aren’t really the point, and neither is the plot. Actually, although I liked the book a lot, at first I wasn’t sure what the point was. I’m still not, really, but I think it might be turning tropes upside down, and I am in favor of that.

So, there are Pam’s parents, who are living happily in sin and are the only loving and contented couple in the book. Then there’s Pam’s grandfather, who is estranged from his daughter more because society expects him to be, and because he misses her and wishes she would leave her opera singer boyfriend and come home, than because he’s really upset about her having run off with a married man. He’s also set up to be the bad-tempered elderly relative who is won over by a cute child, a la Little Lord Fauntleroy, but he’s no crankier than can be excused by his gout and the fact that everyone around him is super boring. And Pam is not cute so much as disturbingly precocious. Then there’s Pam’s father’s wife, who isn’t what anyone expects, the notorious actress who is more morally upstanding than most of the other characters and a Colonial millionaire who sort of defies description.

Pam’s upbringing is pretty lax, and at age ten she’s already decided that she doesn’t believe in marriage, so obviously von Hutton’s job as the author is to organize things so as to mix her up a little. It’s entertaining to see Pam agonizing over the prospect of respectability in the way that heroines of other novels reject the opposite. And, to make things more difficult, von Hutton has arranged one of those test cases like you find in so many adventure novels, where the protagonist has to destroy his own reputation or give up everything he loves or flee the country or something to save his honor, or someone else’s. Only here the woman is responsible for keeping everything super honorable, and the men never quite meet the standard of honor in fictional heroes.

There’s also a fair amount of subtext about being disillusioned even though you thought you didn’t have any illusions left. It’s not a happy book, and it doesn’t end happily — I look forward to finding out what’s going to happen in the sequel –but it mostly feels right. Pam isn’t the kind of book that I get super enthusiastic about, but I do kind of love it. Not a lot, but a little.

Of all the English classes I ever had, my 7th grade one was the best. And part of it was that my teacher was great, and part of it was that I realized that grammar is equal parts fun and fascinating — although I realize I may be alone on that one — but probably the single biggest factor was that we had to write an essay on a short story each week. And I could talk a lot about how helpful it was to have to churn out essays and learn to construct an argument and stuff, but what I’m here to talk about today is how much I hated the short stories.

Middle School and High School English classes do a lot to instill in kids the idea that serious literature is super depressing, and short stories, which tend to be sort of single-minded in pursuit of an idea, make it worse — at least with novels, there’s usually time and space to put in a few scenes that will make you laugh, or, you know, offer sidelights on a character that give you hope that they have inner resources to draw on and won’t spend the rest of their lives completely miserable. If they live to the end of the story, that is.

I mean, there were bright spots: “The Speckled Band.” Dorothy Parker. Vocabulary lessons. But I came out of Middle School English with the conviction that all short stories were terrible and that I would hate them forever, with a grudging exception for detective stories.

Anyway, the point of this is that for a long time I really believed I hated short stories — until a couple of years ago when I realized that I was reading short stories all the time, and loving them. It was just that they were short story series, character-driven and funny instead of literary and depressing. These days I get really excited when an author I’ve been enjoying turns out to have a series of short stories or two. So this is the first in what I expect to be a extremely rambling series of posts about those, and how much fun they are — starting with the super obvious.

Sherlock Holmes

It doesn’t get a lot more obvious than Sherlock Holmes, right? To the point where I don’t need to describe the series at all, because if you don’t already know the premise, you’ve been living under a rock since 1887.I’m only including the Holmes stories here to point out that they’re exactly the same as everything else I’m about to talk about — focused on a character, based around a central conceit, and closely tied to a specific setting. And all about a person who’s better at stuff than everyone around him, which is preferred, if not essential. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is, I think, the most fun — first collections usually are — and I retain my 7th grade fondness for “The Speckled Band,” although I think the one that kind of bowled me over the most when I first read it was “The Red-Headed League.”

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Project Gutenberg doesn’t have the complete Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes or Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, but you get the idea. And the novels are sort of beside the point in this context, but I will freely admit that my favorite Sherlock Holmes Thing is Hound of the Baskervilles, which I love probably beyond reason.

Jeeves and Wooster

Then there’s P.G. Wodehouse. And if Sherlock Holmes is typical of the thing I’m trying to talk about, I don’t know what the Jeeves

So, The Virginian is apparently the first proper western, if we’re not counting pulps — and apparently we’re not. It’s also awfully good.

Usually, when I try to read westerns, the protagonist shoots someone, or semi-accidentally kills a horse, or somehow makes an enemy of someone — probably someone with a mustache — over a poker game, and then I realize I’m only two chapters in and give up.

The hero of The Virginian actually does make an enemy over a poker game in the early chapters, and, since all of those other westerns are probably imitating this one, I guess I could blame Owen Wister for all those books I couldn’t finish. It seems silly, though, to blame someone for being better than his imitators.

Not that they really imitated him that closely, as far as I can tell from the first couple of chapters of maybe three books — clearly I’ve spent a lot of time on this. The Virginian isn’t really what I expected, which was an adventure story. I mean, sure, there are adventures, but they’re not the subject of the book. Instead, it’s about a person, sort of, and more than that, about a place and a time. And when you look at it like that, it makes sense that the book is slow paced and meandering. The Virginian doesn’t need to be carefully structured and tightly plotted. It is, though. What seems scattered at first — The unnamed narrator’s meeting with the unnamed protagonist, the new schoolteacher from Vermont, the Virginian’s old friend Steve and new enemy Trampas, the peculiar behavior of a chicken — is actually really cleverly woven together. All these storylines — the clashes between the Virginian and Trampas, the capabilities of Shorty, the problem of cattle theft and the changing face of Wyoming, etc. — reflect and depend on each other. It’s pretty cool.

Some parts of the book are better then others. There are bits that think they’re funnier than they are, bits that are boring, and bits that are dissatisfying –  I’d include most of the romance storyline under that heading, mostly because having a man pester a girl until she gives in is about as unromantic as courtship gets. But there are also bits that are kind of transcendent. The obligatory accidentally-on-purpose horse-killing, for example, is horrifying and upsetting and completely gripping. And I don’t want to give anything away, but everything pertaining to the hanging of the two cattle thieves is perfect.

I can nitpick all I want, and there’s a lot of material for it, but mostly this is just a really good book. Everything balances out, and the not-so-great bits are made up for by that bits that are completely wonderful. I suspect I’m still never going to be all that into westerns, but it’s nice to know the genre started off so well.